Edith Hamilton on How Athens Fell
There are no doubt many reasons why Athens thrived. But do these reasons also explain its decline?
The classicist Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) once described how Athens fell in just a single page. It comes from her book The Echo of Greece.
Any of this sound familiar?
"What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing.
Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business possessed of great wealth in which all citizens had a right to share…. Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result…. If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms."
I’m familiar with Hamilton because FEE’s longtime president (and current president emeritus), Larry Reed, wrote a splendid article about her in 2021, explaining why Hamilton feared the decline of individualism more than atomic bombs.
Here is some biographical information on her.
“Born in Dresden, Germany to American parents, [Hamilton] grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Her mother and father desired the best education for their five children. They quickly realized that it was not to be found in the public schools. Edith and her three sisters and one brother were all homeschooled, and each one went on to become an accomplished professional.
Alice, for instance, achieved prominence as an authority in industrial toxicology and was the first female appointed to a faculty post at Harvard University. Norah was a pioneer in Art Education for underprivileged children at Hull House in Chicago and in New York City. Margaret was an eminent educator and biochemist. Arthur was an author, professor of Spanish, and assistant dean for foreign students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Edith earned honorary doctorates from Yale, the University of Rochester, and the University of Pennsylvania. Whoever said home schoolers are not properly educated or “socialized” never met the Hamiltons (or any of the many home school families I’ve known).
Edith served for 26 years in various capacities, including head administrator, for the Bryn Mawr School, a college preparatory institution for girls in Baltimore, Maryland. After retiring in her mid 50s in 1922, she decided to start a new career as a writer, one that would allow her to explore a lifelong passion for ancient Greece.
Her first book, The Greek Way, appeared in 1930 when she was 62. Over the next three decades, she would earn a worldwide reputation as an authority on the ancients. The Greek Way was a huge success, as were her later books such as The Roman Way (1932), The Prophets of Israel (1936) and Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). By 1957, nearly five million copies of Mythology alone had been sold.
She loved the ancient Greeks because like her, they loved the mind of the individual. ‘The Greeks were the first intellectualists,” she maintained. ‘In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.’”
If you’re wondering why Greece emerged as the preeminent culture of the ancient world, I think you have part of your answer there. Here is a second, equally important part highlighted by Larry.
“To Edith Hamilton, the mind was each individual human being’s most unique and precious possession. She would be horrified by the notion of ‘the Borg’ in the Star Trek fictional universe. It postulated a single ‘hive mind’ to which humans would be subordinate and obedient. To her, the fact that we each have a mind of our own leads to one inescapable conclusion—namely, that to be fully human, we must be both free and responsible. She was a stalwart friend of the individual—his mind, his rights, and his freedom.”
There are no doubt other reasons why Greece thrived, but I think these are the biggest two reasons: they were a culture built on reason and individualism. Free trade, freedom, and self-reliance followed.
When freedom and self-reliance were replaced by a yearning for government to create “a comfortable life for them,” well, as Hamilton said, “there could be only one result….”